Finished my phD in History, and now I’m basically a NEET for the time being. How’s everyone going? Haven’t active;y used this site for a while, and it’s cool to see the same familiar faces are still here. So, I’d like to ask everyone: on what subjects do you consider yourself most knowledgeable in, and is there anything about it that you think is the most interesting to know?
Congratulations, comrade! I am an expert at keeping personal details to myself.
Hey, welcome back comrade, congrats on the pHD!
A grab bag of things I’m knowledgeable about and a couple fun tidbits about them:
Growing marijuana:
- cannabis plants are annuals, so they die after they flower
- they’re either autoflowering varieties (start producing buds after a set period of time) or photoperiod (start producing buds once they start getting over a certain amount of uninterrupted darkness per day, simulating autumn)
- they can be male or female - female plants produce flowers (buds) while male plants produce pollen
- they can also trans their genders - female plants can naturally start growing pollen sacs, usually in response to stress, and will attempt to self-pollinate
- female plants can be induced to develop pollen sacs by applying colloidal silver to the nodes where the reproductive organs (buds/pollen sacs) grow - this is often done for breeding purposes and the pollen from a female plant produces feminized seeds (guaranteed to be female) which is desirable because female plants are the only ones that get you high
- speaking of getting high, the actual structure on the plant that contains psychoactive compounds are the little hair-like structures that grow on the buds and the surrounding leaves, these are called trichomes
- trichomes are used to determine when the plant should be harvested — they start clear, then become cloudy (peak THCA concentration) and then turn amber (increasing CBDA concentration). You want to harvest when they’re a mix of cloudy and amber, though the ratio is a personal preference (more amber gives a more couchlocky high)
I can also talk your ear off about software infrastructure, database replication, queer readings of Taylor Swift songs, ADHD, lesbian representation in television over the last few decades, composting, and cooking, but my adderall just kicked in so I’m gonna not preemptively do that or I’ll be here all day lol
I remember hearing about autoperiod and photoperiod varieties in biology, but it was the sort of knowledge that my brain sort of just locked away until you mentioned it and I sort of just went ‘huh, yeah that is a thing’.
congrats doctor.
:comfy-cool: gonna waste my time on video games for a bit while I think on how to continue with my life bc atm I have no fucking clue what to do with this pos degree lmao
Congrats! PhD student in condensed matter physics/electrochemistry here! Loads of high-surface-area carbon materials (e.g. activated charcoal, supercapacitor electrodes) are made using toxic chemicals to increase their surface area, but there’s plenty of non-toxic and waste biological matter (e.g. pine needles) which when carbonised do this themselves. Using pine needles as an example, under heating and carbonisation of carbohydrate structures etc. within the leaves, really useful minerals (e.g. magnesium) present within them both react with the carbon lattice to create disorder and intercalate between the graphitic layers which teases them apart. These “mineral porogens” are then washed out, leaving behind micro- and nanopores.
There are soooo many ways of working with nature to create very intricate and deliberately engineered microstructures with really basic equipment - I did this with nothing but a hot plate, tube furnace, and mortar & pestle! Warmed pine needles on a hot plate made the lab smell DIVINE.
:party-parrot-science:
There should be no reason that I can’t replicate that with a frying pan right? I’m assuming also that the needles are washed out with distilled water or something chemically inert like that.
Yep! I carbonised samples between 600 and 1200 C, well within the temperature range of a gas stove, and aye distilled water would be fine! I used ultrapure but that’s just because you get these things literally on tap in labs
I’m edumacateded in chemistry and know stuff about metals. A chunk of a transition metal like gold is kinda one big molecule of metal. The atoms are all linked. It’s why metals fuse when there’s nothing between them. Industries call it contact welding.
I think that’s neat.
Didn’t even know that was a thing. Honestly, metallurgy is probably one of the most underrated areas of advancement in human history - I was impressed to the importance of it when learning about how crucial metallurgy is to the production of quality warships.
Yep, two clean polished pieces of metal, suck out all the air, put the pieces together and you now have one chunk of metal. The atoms don’t know they’re supposed to be separate.
It’s also neat how some civilizations got away with poor iron deposits, like the Aztecs or Japanese. The Aztecs used glass and obsidian instead. Japan developed a bunch of folding methods and shoving in whatever other metals they could find, like silver and nickel.
Could you possibly recommend any books on the history of metallurgy or a broad outline on the subject? Something not super advanced?
I mostly know about the chemistry, not really the history. If that’s still your thing then Chemistry of the Elements by N. N. Greenwood and A. Earnshaw is very good and broad, not too advanced. The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean is fun pop science stuff that gets into broad histories of elemental metals.
is Hoover a yay or nay for his definitive English translation to De re metallica
